The Sound of the Sea
by K. East
Summary: Sirius's childhood has come to an abrupt end. Azkaban is harsher than can be understood by those who've never been. And Marlene is alive. Maybe. What does this spell out for him, now that he has finally been pushed over the edge? Oneshot. Gen.


**The Sound of the Sea**

She called Sirius Black a spirit that could never be broken.

Sirius Black called her a damn wonderful woman.

It would take him years to admit this, and never to her face, when he got the news: _The McKinnons have all been killed in their sleep._ He found it hilariously ironic at the time, that with all the fighting and spying and danger Marlene and her entire family would die in their _sleep_. She would've found the proposal amusing. She would've loved it, actually, and would've loved every second of the God-forsaken funeral minus the obliterated bodies.

It was okay – no one wanted to look at a body or four anyway.

He said to James, "She was a damn wonderful woman," and that's all he said, and then he did nothing because he didn't know anything to do.

He was thrown in jail approximately two years later, twenty-one years old and screaming and yelling his head off. The arrest was so quick he couldn't begin to say a thing – he certainly wasn't afraid, no, Voldemort was dead and the war was over, God! but Lily was dead too and James was dead too and for all Sirius cared, _he_ was dead too.

He was placed rather gently in his cell, contrary to the phrase "thrown in jail" which he found rather laughable, and he fell against the cold iron bars and tried not to let the dementors get to him. It rather failed. The harder he tried to put up a barrier, the easier it was for them to gnaw at his soul, making it feel like he'd never be happy again. Because Sirius's barriers, well, they were all anger and bitterness and jealously and nothing suited for a place as dank and miserable as Azkaban.

Then a voice came out of nowhere that spoke only of sharpness and clarity and identity, a sure and neutral memory when his vision was still muddled by the revelation that Oh my God, _Peter_ was the informant, Remus was telling the _truth_, the war was _over_, and his best friend was stone cold dead.

What had it been, forty-eight hours? Less? He didn't know. He couldn't remember. But he could remember this voice that spoke over the din of insane murmurs, pleas for help, the gasping of dementors.

"Sirius Black. Not entirely unexpected."

He somehow gathered the shock and surprise, the dampened strength of these emotions, to lift his head. He saw in the cell beside him, lying gazing at him from the damp floor, what looked like a skeleton with Marlene McKinnon's eyes.

Everyone talked about Lily's eyes, but he'd had Marlene's memorized for no reason at all, blue with a fine line of green 'round the edges, so they were unnaturally soft and not at all striking like the rest of her.

"You're dead," he said.

"Not quite," she said.

"You're _dead_," he said again, angry. Of course. Of course she wasn't dead. She'd somehow evaded death, evaded discovery, evaded _notice_ the way _Peter_ had evaded notice, and now she was _here_ the way _Peter_ should be here, suffering and going made the way that rat bastard, in every fiber in his fat and worrying body, ought to be suffering and going mad.

"Again, not quite," she said again, as if Sirius had said this all out loud, and maybe he had. Personally after his deranged murder spree he'd never had quite the same grip on himself. Ha ha ha. See, Sirius Black could still make jokes. He could still live.

He looked at her soft eyes and he wanted very much to die right there on the spot.

--

A spider crept past Sirius's nose toward its web in the corner. The side of his face was frozen and pink from lying on the floor. He plucked the spider between two long fingernails and ate it.

Crunch.

Life.

Marlene was watching him from her cell, pressed unashamedly against the bars that separated them. She was dying. She was dying because she didn't have the strength, she said, to eat spiders and drink the dew that beaded on the walls in the late hours, running into rivulets and making a tantalizing dripping noise, so Sirius was driven mad – if she wouldn't drink it he'd gladly come to her cell and do it for her; he was constantly hungry, thirsty, tired, sad, clawing for a foothold on life.

He let his head fall back to the floor and said to her, the only words exchanged for weeks, "They want you to die."

She responded without moving. "Every time you turn into a dog and go into your haven, there, I want _you_ to die."

Sirius wished James were here, talented, resourceful James, or bright, intuitive Lily. They would know what to do. What to say. It seemed they _always_ knew what to do. Or maybe, he thought, that was his mind idealizing the dead – it could be that James was a sanctimonious and egotistical ruffian who lived more for the thrill than the greater good, and it also could be that Lily was a self-oppressing, overly dramatic woman who would do anything for the approval of others.

Sirius didn't know.

Sirius didn't know, and further he didn't want to know.

Marlene had come crawling over, gaunt in her too-long prison uniform. It lapped about her ankles and she looked at him almost jealously for he, at least, had more to him than bones.

She said, "So the Potters are dead."

He flinched and bared his teeth a little, feeling the familiar vein of despair as a dementor passed by. He was shaking.

"Did you kill them?"

Silence.

Then, "Yeah."

More silence.

"Why are you here?" he asked instead.

Marlene ignored this and ran her thin fingers through thin grey hair, hair he remembered as wonderful long and thick and all shades of brown on a good day. He felt his own mane of hair and his beard and wondered if he was also going grey.

He was 22, only 22.

Marlene watched him and finally whispered, "When you get out of here, tell them I died with the rest of my family."

"I won't get out of here," he whispered back, feeling frosty, "because I killed fifteen people." Twelve Muggles. Peter. Lily. _James_.

"Just tell them," she said, her eyes unfocused.

Sirius pressed himself against the bars so they were nearly touching, two souls inches apart, desperate for human contact. He would give anything to remember the warmth of another person's breath against his face, or a hand on his hand, or a smile, a true smile, directed at him.

He tried not to cry. He said, "Tell them yourself."

It made absolutely no sense, but that was okay, because he was in Azkaban. Most people simply didn't talk by this point.

She leaned as close as possible so he could see the yellow in her teeth and said, "I was sentenced for three years. But now I'm dead. So I guess I'm not going anywhere."

She began laughing madly. She couldn't stop.

Sirius vomited.

--

Cornelius Fudge visited one day. The second time during Sirius's imprisonment.

It was a glorious day for Azkaban, because dementor numbers were cut in half. Aurors were everywhere. Sirius looked for people he knew but the people he knew were either dead or retired, relieved from the end of the war and satisfied to leave security in the hands of a younger generation.

Fudge strolled down the long row of cells, glancing momentarily at each prisoner, and when it was Sirius's turn, he sat straight up on his cot and brushed the limp hair out of his eyes and said, easy as you please, "Hello there, Minister."

The look of surprise on Fudge's face was almost amusing, and for one brief second Sirius managed to cling to that good feeling before the dementors sucked it out.

"Ah, Black," he said a bit nervously. "I suppose you'll be wanting my newspaper again?"

"Yes – miss reading the advice column," Sirius responded in the most polite voice he could manage. He wanted that newspaper, alright. He _needed_ it, needed a bit of good news, a bit of humanity, and maybe –

- somehow -

- the Lord knew why -

- a mention of Harry?

"Here you are, then," Fudge said warily, shoving that morning's _Daily Prophet_ between the bars. The first thing Sirius looked at was the date:

December 24, 1981.

It was Christmas Eve. The Minister of Magic was spending Christmas Eve visiting Azkaban instead of with family, and Sirius almost felt a pang of pity – except he remembered that _he_ was spending Christmas Eve, and every day after that, _in_ Azkaban.

He laughed loudly. To his right, Marlene stirred but said nothing. In front of him, Fudge looked clearly discomfited at his outburst.

"I'll be going then; good evening, Black -"

"Wait," Sirius said, almost dropping the newspaper as he got up from his cot and moved toward the bars. "That thing I asked you before -"

The Minister shivered. "Mr. Lupin declined to visit. I'm very sorry."

He began to walk away.

"But I'm innocent!" Sirius screamed, and as his voice echoed off the walls he realized he sounded as demented as everyone else.

Demented. Dementors.

Ha ha ha ha ha.

--

"How long's it been?" Marlene's voice broke through to his consciousness as he once again lay on the floor, staring at a flea.

He hadn't even needed to turn into a dog this time.

"How long since what?" he said, delicately pinching the flea between two fingers. A grisly death.

"Anything – my death, the end of the war, Fudge's visit, when you killed a flea."

Her speech sounded careless, even garbled. He glanced at her, and his mind was slow – it had always been slow, lately – to decide the expression on her face.

"Marlene," he said, looking at her grey skin.

She didn't respond.

"Marlene," he said, looking at her stick-thin arms.

They received rations here. Enough to keep them going, enough, supposedly, to keep her from looking like that.

It suddenly occurred to him that _he_ wasn't getting any thinner anymore. _He_ had reached a point, but he'd stopped there.

"_Marlene_," he said, looking at her yellow eyes.

She said, "Don't you just love the sound of the sea?"

She pressed her ear to the grey wall.

He turned away.

--

"That's Marlene McKinnon," he heard himself saying to Moody, while the picture shook between his fingers. As if either of them needed reminding. "Her whole family were killed two weeks after taking this picture."

He sounded, looked, felt so normal. As if he'd never been betrayed. Never lost James and Lily. Never spent half his life behind bars, slowly going mad…

Marlene. A damn wonderful woman.

It occurred to him that he'd never figured out why she'd been in Azkaban in the first place, or why people had been allowed to simply believe that she was dead.

Dead.

Maybe, for all that time, she had been. Dead.

And for now, Sirius could only tell people as much as they wanted to know, and he could only think about the future and he could only focus on being, acting normal. No one cared to hear about the voices in his head, or the desperate way he'd hoped for a reprieve, or the hollow hum of waves rocking against the walls of the prison. And leaving dew. Life.

No one cared about the sound of the sea.

Except her.

Except Marlene.

Sirius smiled, because she'd called him a spirit that could never be broken.

But that's what he was.

Broken.

END


End file.
